It's hard to find Mr. Right when you are married. And when you're a lesbian.

This post is part 4 in a series detailing how my wife and I met the father of our child and ultimately got pregnant. If you missed part 3 it is here.

Circa June 2010. Ottawa, Ontario.

“So… we met someone. A guy.” My wife and I blush as we tell our friend about the man we met on the internet. She looks a bit confused but we continue gushing without leaving a space for her to ask questions. “He’s 41, lives in New York and works in advertising. He’s funny… like witty funny with a bit of self-deprecating sarcasm… and kind and smart and really good looking.” We alternate chiming in, rhyming off his many attributes. “But most importantly he wants what we want. He wants to be present in the child’s life but not a full-time parent.” Our friend smiles, cluing in that we have met a potential sperm donor/dad and are not kinking up our sex life. At this point we have only shared emails with the guy and our friend, a long time veteran of internet dating, is quick to caution us to lower our expectations. She’s right and we know it. But we are just SO READY to get this baby plan moving that we mostly ignore her sage wisdom.  “Well you are both lucky that I have a boyfriend right now,” she laughs and lightens the mood. “I would be awfully pissed off if my married lesbian friends found one before I did.”

 

The advantage of my obsessive picture taking and detail oriented memory is that I have a picture to illustrate almost any day of my life. This is a picture from the day that conversation was had.

We spent the next several weeks sending emails back and forth. Andy is a really great writer and that made it easy to fall in love with him. If you are ever in the position of needing to long distance online date someone I suggest doing it with somebody creative and articulate. Just a little tip from me to you. You’re welcome.

I will never forget the excitement that was in the air during that time. The possibilities were endless and Tracy and I were daydreaming machines. Getting new emails from Andy was always so exciting. And the more he talked the more we loved him.  I even found a website that would take a picture of me and a picture of him and mash the two together to see what our child would look like. Which I think is basically the married-lesbian-looking-for-a-man-to-father-your-child equivalent of writing Mrs.[insert grade school boy’s last name] on your notebook. Except that Andy had a beard in all of his pictures so our child came out with a 5 o’clock shadow.

 

While waiting to meet for the first time we got to know Andy a little better by stalking reading his facebook profile.  His profile went back to 2007 and we (mostly I) went all the way back looking at every post, status and photo. You can’t really be too stalkery when you are considering having a baby with somebody you met on the internet. It would have been irresponsible not to obsessively check him out. Right? At one point he sent us a picture of himself as a small child and we responded by telling him how cute he was and thanking him for sharing. Little did he know that the picture was actually number 546 out of the 714 he was tagged in and we already saw it.  Stalking his profile didn’t turn up anything scary. In fact, it looked like he had great friends and a loving family. We were falling more and more in love with the idea of it all.

We planned to meet in Montreal a few weeks later and we were waiting for the day with eager anticipation. What does one wear to meet the man you met on the internet who might give you sperm and father the child you plan to raise with your wife? There’s no precedent for that really. Apparently I really liked that purple and gray striped shirt in the picture above that summer because that’s ultimately what I wore when we met Andy as well. As excited as we were to meet him the advice of my friend weighed heavily on my mind. She had cautioned us that when you meet someone online everything sounds great because you interpret his words through your own lens. Would it be the same with Andy? Were we setting ourselves up for disappointment? And more on that next time.

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